When a mighty tree falls to the ground, the landscape changes and nothing looks the same. Especially here in Canada and in the UK, many are unsettled and unexpectedly touched by the death of the Queen. Something that had roots deep in the past has gone. Part of what shakes us is that we wonder what of the stable past will survive. A related question just beneath is what have we lost of the past that we don’t know we’ve lost.
I think quite a lot. Some years ago I had a dream that brought these questions to the fore. Here’s the dream:
I was walking with a friend through a landscape of colorful, beautiful fields. We came to a few trees, one of which had been marked with a white sleeve about a yard high. This sleeve designated it as a memorial to the men of old. I realized that the other trees were part of this too. Then I looked off to the right and saw a long row of large, craggy evergreens, all part of this memorial. I was touched that this tribute to the men of old was alive in these living trees.
I woke feeling grateful for the men who forged the modern era. I felt their anchoring power and was grateful for the stabilizing institutions they’d brought into being.
Back beyond them in the western tradition are the men of ancient Greece and Israel and the men of the British Isles. We have remembered history of them going back thousands of years. Much of our cultural, philosophical and religious traditions stems from them. One thing that strikes me reading of these men was the emphasis they placed on physical courage, especially in battle.
That emphasis is remembered in the names of men today. We could take any family as example and my own will do. My father was Louis Barry MacDonald. The name Louis is from the same root as “loud” and means loud or famous and has roots in battle, as in “battle cry.” Barry means “spear.” Mac of course means “son of” and the Donald comes from roots that mean world and Ruler, It’s hard to imagine he wasn’t a serious fighter. My own name Andrew means strong, or manly, especially in the physical sense.
If you read Homer, the motives and rhetoric of the protagonists were all about being powerful fighters. Loyal sons strove to be like their father. The men fought to protect the community and also to win the women they loved; the men were loved for their fighting prowess. The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’ return from the Peloponnesean war to the waiting Penelope that a host of suitors are trying to bed. There was no mistaking what the manly virtues are that Odysseus carried. They include strength in battle, courage in leadership and long-lasting love for his wife. He had moral courage as well and overcame personal challenges to make it home.
That physical courage of fighting in battle isn’t the quality we need now. But we do need moral courage. Moral courage is closely tied to a sense of vision. You can’t be courageous except in service to something that’s greater than you.
The Book of Proverbs in the Bible has it that “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It’s not only that the individual perishes but that the people do. All of us. Courage and vision are part of the same thing. (Women’s courage and vision are related too but not my focus.).
Most modern men in the west don’t need the physical external courage of Hercules, Odysseus and Joshua. But the moral courage we do need. Although imperfect, there was courage and a shared vision among the tribe of men that reached way (way) back into the past. It was mutually strengthening and passed along to sons and then to theirs. It was part of the air men and women breathed.
It’s true many of us have misplaced that thread in the modern day. But it’s still there without a mark on it, part of a larger mythic story of lost and found. The big stories, the true ones don’t die. The thread’s still there on the ground, waiting to be picked up again.
Andrew
AndrewCarterMacDonald.com
There’s a lot here. I agree that this time doesn’t (yet?) call for courage in battle, at least not for most men. But I often think about how for Odysseus coming home entails giving up his chance at immortality.
Hummm Andrew..thanks for this sharing...one story,..., leads and lends itself to another..like threads on some fine fabric...we sew.,.. in the inward spaces of release and remembering,...the swaddling blanket of a Pneuman...that within every man a boy...something of original innocence..wonder..curisity ..fluidity in the emotional body.. ..to such a degree that he might remember himself as a soul ..as a being not yet hardened by the thousand year conditioning...that is some long drawn armoring against ones true nature///That ..at best...the mind of the manufactured man ....might become a student of his own dissolution...softening into the breath ..softening into the belly ...softening through some great crying,...as the water breaks ...deep in the belly of unlived life...And even to approach this doorway a man must..through some mysterious and magical and dream infused state,.. somehow activate his internal Feminine that is the doorway to his own reconception...this feminine nature,,,, not of woman,,,.but rather...the subtle sense...in intuition...dream...breath and body and something more sensual and fluid ....something that stretches and bends a man down towards the earth of his own undoing....To realize..to allow oneself to be penetrated by the wisdom that' I have made someone up' ..to such a degree that i might enter the bathtub of the absolute hopelessness of it all...and that here where I am completely gone...awash without hope or design of any kind...here I might be softened into the truth that I am...presence itself ...consciousness that is whole body ...that I sit if field of awareness that is not my own and yet ever available an immacuately aligned with this moment..that is also without time ..without any of me .That I am, without a thought, deeply interconnected with all of lviing and dying ..here time and I fall away and I am at one with the trees and rivers and creatures and a wisdom that is not my own yet immaculately aligned with this moment.....
And within every boy ..an old man..this masterful expression and articualtion of the boys original curiosity...In this way we are midwifes of our own souls....the mother of own remembering...and that this mysterious way is a downward stroke..born of a certian humility...and a deep attention to the breath and the belly and the wound body that like some snake of suffering has wrapped itself so skillfully around this essential self ,,..as if to say ...if you want this way..if you walk this way...if you are called this way by disease or depression or some unknown ghost or God...that then you will surely suffer...unto me...you will experience the necessary cracking ....you will be drawn asunder by the contractions of your own undoing...the water will break...and a Pneuman will be born here.......a warrior of awareness...a knight of presence.....a king of nothing